If I Opened a Smoke Shop...

It would be about the hookah.
_ . Sure, I would sell incense, and really cool blankets, and Alice in Wonderland posters...
_ . But I wouldn't sell bon-- excuse me, water pipes. I wouldn't sell pieces or papers or porn.
_ . I would sell ACCESSORIES. Do you know how many smoke shops have hookah bowls? 1/3 I've been to in the past few weeks. I would sell hookahs (of course), and I would stock SO MUCH SHISHA. And there would be COUCHES all over. And a lounge in the back. I would have a refrigerator with wine, and orange juice, and iced coffee JUST for putting in your vase water because WHY NOT.
_ . I wouldn't have to card anyone just for walking in (maybe). The windows would not be blacked out.

_ . The last shop I went into was Mezmerize in Bowling Green, OH. And all things considered, it was really really nice. It was very clean, bright, wide open. They had a lot of brands of shisha there and more flavors of Hookah-Hookah than I think I've even seen online. But there was a list on the wall of "words that would get you kicked out" because they would give the implication that that $10 highlighter in the case was, in fact, an item of PARAPHERNALIA, as is this beautiful crafted glass mouse, and this funny looking paperweight, and that lamp. There was also a shrouded-off corner of adult videos.
_ . You can look right over in my Dislikes and see that I am a pot vegetarian (in like as I don't partake), and stoner culture rather annoys me, no offense. I don't have a problem with people/my friends that do get high nor do I have a problem with them doing it really, but the stereotype - and the few individuals I've met that fit it - get my knickers in a knot. Where I was comfortable in Mezmerize, and in 90% of the smoke shops I've been in despite the overwhelming dominance of barely-passing pieces, I don't like how hookah is an ill-represented afterthought in such places, and I detest how hookah is lumped in with marijuana culture by those who don't know what it's about.
_ . Profiling like that is why I have 2 friends that who'd love to smoke with me all the live-long day, but their parents can't know I (or they) have a hookah. It's why my mom about flipped her shit when I said the word, and I'm not technically allowed to smoke while I'm under her roof. People that fancy themselves (or want their parents to think) they are clean, above-the-table, and even downright prudes can and should be allowed to investigate hookah because it is safe, tasty, classy, social, and legal if you're of age. I don't think that shisha and ganja should be inextricably linked, and definitely not synonymous. And let people like me be the reason why!
_ . If I opened a smoke shop, it would be about hookah and nothing but the hookah. It would give shisha a good reputation, a clear picture of the history, tradition, and products. My lounge would not pump gangster metal, sell chicken fingers, and peddle weed out the back. My establishment would not be sketchy, just smoky. A hookah bar and shop for hookah snobs like me.

And scene.

Also? I want to learn how to indent here. Would it have to be an Html trick? Baaaalls do I hate the _ . buisiness.

Tay-kin care uh biz-ness

I applied, if you can call it that, to be a field rep for Sahara Smoke Co. They're a downright respectable Co, there! They are the producers of dear dicro Zia, of This Blog acclaim. Basically I'll be pestering you to buy a hookah and hookah accesories. But I'll give you coupon codes to do it, so it's not so bad.

I'm a little shaky on the exact details but from my limited experience with ordering, and their super nice support team that logs onto Skype for business hours, I'm expecting nothing but a positive experience. A work-from-home sort of job will be really fantastic I think. I'll put away the very little money I make and it'll follow me to and from school. Plus I'll spread hookah around and that's great.

See? Look at me. I'm blogging even when I start off with something very well contemplated to say and wind up watching CSI and taking an inordinate amount of time to write what I did remember to say. Pats for Becky! Who's trying her damndest to work for a living or something. I don't know.

Oh, and if you didn't catch my drift before, GO CHECK OUT SAHARA SMOKE DOT COM! GO RIGHT NOW!

I Have Something to Salute, Besides America

Don't get me wrong, America's great and all. But I wanted to take a moment and pay homage to the best li'l box of coals in the whole big hookah world... Chronic Hookah Instant-Light Coconut Charcoals! I found these beauties on thehookah.com . I ordered them with my first round of H-H tobacco and they have gotten me this far!! I know, I've had myriad hiatus...es... hiati? *shudder*... I know, I've had several periods of dormancy and so maybe to you cynical blogosphere types think that over 8 months of loyal hookah-heating doesn't sound that impressive? But it friggin' is!

Chronic provides the low eco-impact of using gathered coconut husks of all things to make up their squares. They are a low-ash, slow-heat, and flavor-neutral coal. Furthermore they come in a handy dandy quick light option which is DA BOMB. I've never had a bad experience with them in terms of longevity and heat. They're pretty caustic as they're lighting, but you need chemicals to make a quick light light, so, *shrug* I love you Chronic Hookah! You're the best and I'm never going back.

In the coming days (or weeks, ugh) when my big Box'o'108 actually runs out, I'm going to order some shisha with it, using whatever meager funds I can scratch together at this financially desolate time of year, and I am deliberately avoiding Hookah-Hookah shisha. Not because I don't love it, no, but because I realize it's basically all I've ever talked about.

And if you didn't come to a hookah blog to read about hookah talk, I want to go on the record and say that the next time I see a wedding dress with a see-through bodice I'm gonna flip my shit. I am a liberal feminist sex-liking artsy type and I STILL get sick to my stomach when I hear a bride talk about how "sexy" she wants to look on her wedding day and how naked she will try to be in a ump-teen thousand dollar dress.

TTFN!

Do you watch Hell's Kitchen?

It's one of the shows that my family sits down and watches together. It's normally pretty entertaining and it's not as over-dramatized as some reality gameshows out there and... I dunno, watching people get yelled at is enjoyable sometimes.

This year it's really awful though. The red team (formerly the girl's team until they got a guy that was going to be eliminated from the blue team) just HATES each other and they're all real real incompetent. So, they don't win, which makes them mad at each other, so they yell at each other, and they lose challenges... on and on and on. I don't want that negativity in my life. Even the winning team is complainers. And yet I watch.

At first I had a very poignant series of rhetorical questions to finish that up with but I'll be damned if I can't formulate it anymore. Whatevs. Peace.

Hey dere! Whatcha been dooin l8ly? (Updated, now with links)

• _ Finding out that Blogger does that thing where if you hit "enter" in the subject line it publishes a blank post. I left many an e-mail account because of that inane business Blogger!
• _ Lifetime Original Movies. Bad ones. I'm so sorry, brain cells.
• _ Planning to get a Chinese Water Dragon! My rats are 2 years old and one has cancer. And I'm an over-organizer. You can't blame me for looking up prices & housing requirements, and sketching out the large enclosure I will build for a pet I don't have yet... especially when the critter's so darn pretty. Aaaand, I, uh, need the herpetology experience, yeah.
• _ Making and varying cream cheese frosting... I'm so sorry, waist. I'm still trying to decide if it's better for me for it to be eaten with a food item vessel or consumed straight via tablespoon.
  
• _ Trying my damndest to get out and about, fighting both restlessness and sloth. Walking is nice in the evenings, even during a Cincinnati summer.
  
• _ Looking at Ecuador pictures constantly and missing that country like craaazy. Oh, you want to look at them too? Okay. Here's my Facebook albums un, deux, trois. Public links even!
  
• _ Making a pretty complete list of commercials I can't stand and the inconruencies, annoyances, and frequency/timing issues that result in my distaste.
• _ Inquiring after internship laces where I can play with big kitties, and/or slothes. (That's the British pronunciation, you know. "And the people did feast upon the lambs, and slothes, and carp... and fruit bats..." like.)
  
• _ NOT WATCHING LEGEND OF THE SEEKER, THAT'S FOR DAMN SURE! *pout*
  
• _ Not working, nor attending LCCC for chemistry, either, much to my chagrin. But it is what it is. I'm working the "Don't Panic" angle and it's going pretty swell, despite the pressure from my parents.
• _ Not writing for the Nerdist empire, sadly. That makes my dream of befriending Chris Hardwick seem nigh impossible, but it does make me want to breathe new life into this anemic little blog of mine.
  
• _ Not smoking hookah. Go figure.

ComFest is on my horizon, as is dog-sitting and other family-based money earnings. Whoo hoo!
You can bet your boots I'll bee hooking (hookah-ing?) in C-bus this weekend. Have faith in me, intarwubbians. I'll write to you when I'm not bleeding money on artsy things and booze.

**You Are Reading This 2 Weeks Ago**

Gone to the Galapagos, see you in two weeks!

Hm? Oh, the asteriks didn't actually transport you back in time? That's odd.

So hey! I went to Ecuador for 2 weeks and spent half of that time in the Galapagos! I didn't tell you then because I was too busy frantically packing and you're just the internet. I can't tell you now because I've been up for 48 hours. Even with my massive influx of equatorial vitamin D I just don't have the energy to give you proper freakout. I've told my stories many times today.

Pictures will all go onto Photobucket and then Facebook and they will be mind-boggling. I also want to give on official poo-poo to Flickr for making me sign up for another Yahoo account after I'd just dropped my old one and THEN only letting me upload 100MB and 2 videos worth. I have almost 1,000 high-quality (i.e. 1 MB or more each) pics and videos to get off this lappy before it dies, man! Plus one of my friends backed up her stuff so she could delete and re-fill a memory card. Bo. Gus.

Goodnight, Internet, I love you!!!

Tedano, Ryukyu, Ohio, Oh My!

I can add to my list of marketable skills: being sole run crew for a show with 5 hours practice time and a non-English speaking stage manager.
This weekend I made upwards of $90 pulling curtains for the Tedano Kai dance troupe from Okinawa. "Living Legend" dancers were part of this group man, and they were coming to where, Buttsquat, Ohio? I guess the Ohio-Okinawa Association was having their 15th anniversary or something and they got THESE GUYS. What an honor... for, you know, the people it meant something to.
The dances were, like techno music, all the exact same tempo and key. Unlike techno, however, the dances were [sometimes painfully] slow and often had many scenes.
What WAS cool were the elaborate costumes and makeup. It was incredibly theatrical and I was glad to be backstage for it. The quick-change from a princess to a demon? Bad. Ass. There was also a really neat dragon puppet who had basically a box for a head and ribbons for a body. I don't know much else of what was going on.

So, they brought their own stage manager and he's used to a.) having total control and b.) keying in a time and having the curtains fly in/out with the push of a button. I am not a button! And what with him changing his mind a lot there was, I think, no smooth runs of the show. In my original notes the instructions were to slowly close the curtain until the last dancer was off, or slowly raise the curtain to set the pace of the music. Well, that's all well and good until you're getting the small circles to speed it up EVERY time and eventually there was no point in doing it anything but full speed every time. *shrug*
The translator was a really nice guy, but he admitted to not speaking the Okinawan dialect and in terms of stagecraft he got in the way sometimes. I got pretty used to Mr. Stage Manager pointing at me and saying something equivalent to "go." Jim (translator) gave a lot of "wait" fingers that looked like "raise the curtains now" and thumbs-ups that meant, alternately, "you're fine" and "okay, go now." He also stood in my sight line more than once which is irksome. He gave me a hug when I left though so it's cool.
At the end of these meticulous, traditional, artistic dances, they did a free dance to "Hang On Sloopy" and all the people on headset died a little inside. Personally, it's like reason #4 that I didn't go to OSU. Why are you doing this to me, Grand Masters Chie Tamagusuku and Shizue Matayoshi? Why? Why are you allowing this to go on in your presence?
It was also one of those uncomfortably long jokes too. By which I mean the whole song. Songs are a joke for maybe the first chorus. Then people start to think you're insulting their intelligence. At least I did.


All in all they were very polite people. They bought us lunch, and gave me $10 to mostly sit around after paying their own way to get here. Hope they had a good time stateside!

Also, this is a curtain experience in which my hand were not ripped to bloody shreds. All in all I don't think it could have gotten much better.

Reviiiiiiieeeeeeew.

Becky's Shisha Kitchen!
Recipies of Delicious Smoking

Much like the last time we met in this kitchen, I made a good-faith effort to use up all the flavors that I'd originally slapped on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and said "No! Bad shisha! You are not licorice! Bad!" and shoved to the back of the drawer where all the rest of my broken dreams are held. Last time was a great repossession/success! This time was too. And it proved once and for all that

I am a better flavor tester than anyone currently working
for the Hookah-Hookah corporation.

Pomegranate, Really

Things I was keeping in mind: 7-Spice lost incredible degrees of anise with just time and air, I need a way to combat anise besides coolness (mint), FIE UPON YOU, ANISE.
The Mix: 1/2 Pomegranate, 1/2 Margarita
The Result: Oh man. Oh man oh man. This stuff is seriously delicious, y'all. It's flavorful, fruity, and somewhat sour. It's full bodied and a little sweet, but not candy sweet. You'd know this is a tobacco product, but it's so clearly a nice pomegranate taste too. Not overbearing, I mean to say. It's a rich flavor that speaks its flavor and its plant biology very eloquently. I held this smoke in for quite some time and wound up with a nice nicotine/O2-deprivation buzz. Whee!
Margarita, you and me are like this now, buddy. You're fruit's best friend. Here's to taking on Orange next.

Now get outta my kitchen.

TTFN, world!